The gradual evolution of Maltese wedding photography closely follows the paths of fashion and those of photography. Before the advent of more portable cameras, before the digital revolution, photography was slow, expensive, cumbersome. This reflected itself in the end product: there is usually only one photo, that of the bride and the groom, of even just of the bride on her own. Sometimes two, in the better-off classes: the second photo being that of the wedding presents.

At first the Maltese wedding photo generally shows the two spouses on their own, both standing up – differently from other photos of already-married couples where one is usually seated and the other standing (in Maltese family photos of the late 19th and early 20th century, the man is generally comfortably seated, while the woman stands up, noticeably glum or resentful, behind him). It is only later, in Malta, that the wedding photo starts including the bridesmaids, the best man, the pages and flower girls, the witnesses and the celebrant. These were at first left out as clutter.

More often than not, the bride and groom had their wedding photo or photos taken at the photographer’s studio (all the guests impatiently waiting at the reception venue, sipping rosolin and luminata, checking out, enviously or critically, what the others were wearing). In the UK, many spouses visited the studio days before or after the wedding day; I am not aware if that occurred in Malta too.

Very rarely, at first, was the professional photographer hired to come to where the festin or trattament or the repos took place, usually the house of the parents of the bride or the groom – repos as in reception, not as in repurchase agreement. The bulky equipment and the lighting required made it far more practical, and less expensive, to have the wedding photo snapped in the photographer’s studio.

Major evolutions in the style of wedding imagery follow closely the advances in photographic techniques. All the earlier photos have the spouses stiff and painfully posed. Sometimes they look like towards the end of a bad haemorrhoid day. With time, they become more relaxed – there is also some dynamism in their bearing. This was necessarily so, as shutter speeds and sensitive emulsions were at first slow, and any movement by the sitters would result in a blurred, ruined negative.

It is not the spouses’ fault that in older photos they often appear uncomfortably frozen and lifeless. They almost look like still-life paintings. The concept of ‘candid photography’ was then far removed from the studio artist’s mind. It was essentially portraiture, not reportage.

Though colour photography became available round 1860, the various early processes were far too complicated, unreliable and costly to be used commercially. The first wedding photos in real colour I have seen date to the 1950s.

Though hand colour-tinting of photos had existed since the earliest days of photography, it was during or after World War I that the fashion started of hand-tinting black and white wedding photos, with rather weird, flat, results. The artists used oil-based, water or aniline colours; John Ciancio of Valletta and Joseph Cassar of Ħamrun specialised in this colouring of wedding photos, though many studios advertised their ability to tint monochrome images long before that. I have in my collections very early portrait work, hand-coloured by Michele Zahra of 125, Britannia Street, Valletta, Thomas Fenech of Margherita Hill, Cospicua, and the London Studio of 107, St John Street, Valletta.

I have seen a pre-World War I set of wedding photos running to four: one photo of each of the spouses on their own, one of them together and a final one of the wedding presents. That’s extravagance for you – four images. This exceptional four-photo set, though unsigned, is quite probably by Ellis and is found in an album where all the other (non-wedding) photos can be dated to around 1913.

The fashion of this, unidentified, lady’s gown also coincides with that date. She, too, is wearing a constraining corset and looks moderately fierce. Despite the groom’s dashing moustache, which would have made a Prussian corporal proud, I believe I know who would be having the last word (Fig. 6).

All the earlier photos have the spouses stiff and painfully posed. Sometimes they look like towards the end of a bad haemorrhoid day

The Maltese media quite often published full accounts of society weddings, together with detailed lists of the presents received. I chose the following news item because, quite exceptionally, the photographer is mentioned by name. Lt Robert Hamilton Anstruther (later admiral), of HMS Phaeton on January 6, 1890, married the “excessively pretty” 20-year-old Edith Flora Peel at St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Valletta. I am still working out how a girl can be excessively pretty.

A heavy contingent of the big British brass in Malta was present; not a single Maltese seems to have been invited, so no surprises there. The spouses held their “very numerously attended” reception at St John’s House.

The reporter gives a minute description of the clothes worn by Miss Peel. Her wedding dress was “of rich white satin with a train, low bodice in the Directoire style and high Medicis collar (a outsized upstanding collar of starched lace, made popular almost three centuries earlier by Marie de’ Medici) and trimmed with white silk and silver appliqué.

“She also carried a large bouquet of roses and white hyacinths and was followed to the altar by a single bridesmaid, her sister Miss Lucy Peel, who wore a dress of fine white muslin richly embroidered and trimmed with Valenciennes (bobbin lace) and white tulle hat covered with white ostrich feathers.”

For her ‘going away’ the bride wore “a travelling dress of dark green habit cloth with gold embroidered waistcoat, black Gainsborough hat with pale yellow ostrich tips”.

“A photograph of the bridal party on their return from the ceremony was taken by Lieut. Curry of the Edinburgh.” A detailed list of the wedding presents and who gave them also forms part of the newspaper’s reportage.

Edwardian photos of wedding presents, stacked neatly and importantly, deserve a study on their own. They have about them a pompous sense of propriety that matches their triumphant sense of futility. One can see loads of over-decorated silver and crystal, chiffoniers, whatnots, candlesticks, hanging mirrors, majolica vases, fretwork, papier mâché. In fact, everything, so long as it was not too obviously useful (Fig. 7).

One spin-off from the wedding-present compulsion was the fact that, in an era when privacy was greatly valued, details of the presents given in weddings of notable people, who gave what, often ended printed in newspapers. The threat of publication must have had a chilling effect. It loosened the purse strings, it hung the dread of brutta figura over anyone invited. It fuelled the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses syndrome; it coerced one to subordinate wisdom to rashness. Blackmail, by any other name, would smell as sour. No one had yet come up with the idea of the wedding list at a posh household store, certainly more practical, if slightly more earthy.

An issue of the Malta Herald in 1908 published in great detail the presents received on the occasion of the wedding of Dr Arturo Mercieca (later Sir and Chief Justice) to his bride Josephine ‘Nusa’ Tabone (1889-1972). Besides the interminable and totally predictable list of silver fish-knives and bread baskets and cut glass champagne flutes and fruit stands, it is gratifying to identify a few, a very few, who thought outside the box.

Mr O. (Olof?) Gollcher gave the spouses a composition of camellias, the groom’s brother Alfredo, a water colour painting. The artists Giuseppe Cali, his son Ramiro and Helene Buhagiar also gave paintings, their own presumably. Notary Francesco Schembri Zarb came up with an art nouveau terracotta clock. Most inventive, or perhaps most impertinent of all, Mr and Mrs J. Zimelli outdid all the others by giving the newlyweds an Angora cat.

A comparison with the presents given on the occasion of a high bourgeois British wedding with a strong Malta connection is, I believe, quite instructive. The local press published the list of gifts, and who gave them, received by Miss Henrietta Mary Blundell and Lt Colin Richard Keppel RN (later admiral) when they got married in London in June 1889. The father of the bride, Col Richard Blundell Hollinshead Blundell, an army careerist, had been posted to Malta, and was quite popular here; he eventually retired with the rank of major general.

A large number of the Blundell wedding gifts consisted of prized gems – brooches, rings, pendants, bangles, bracelets, stars, chatelaines, all studded with precious stones. Strangely, no ear-rings – was there a transient social prejudice against body piercings? The Maltese lists of wedding presents were far more, shall we say, homely. It is obvious, from these descriptions, that gifts were meant specifically for the bride, not for both spouses.

The press dedicated almost a whole page to the Tabone-Mercieca wedding, dubbed, “without any doubt the most important social event of this season”, and to the spouses, their families, what they wore, what jewellery they sported, the 400 guests. The 30-year-old, up-and-coming lawyer Arturo Mercieca had four years earlier fallen in love with the beautiful young ‘Nusa’ and they got married at the Jesuit oratory in Valletta on February 4, 1908, a day when it rained viciously.

Details of the presents given in weddings of notable people, who gave what, often ended printed in newspapers. The threat of publication must have had a chilling effect

Mercieca was then already distinguishing himself as a jurist and as front-runner of the nationalist movement. This is reflected in the guest list which, with minor exceptions, reads like the roll-call of the nationalist factions in Malta, with spouses. The fact that the Malta Herald, and not the imperialist Malta Chronicle, published the story, could be equally eloquent.

I will limit myself to reproduce the description of the sumptuous bridal gown: “Miss Tabone wore a beautiful Princess Dress of very fine white silk with wide stripes of satin and moiré with a very long and perfectly cut train over which was draped a piece of exquisite Point de Langon lace, which was caught up over the waist by a costly diamond buckle; the trimmings were silk embroidery, the dress showed off the perfect figure of the bride and the tulle veil, which was held up by a tiara of orange blossoms, showed to advantage the bride’s beautiful features. She carried a beautiful feather bouquet of white roses and white hyacinths with streamers of white ribbons.”

A wedding photo of the bride on her own, taken by the Grand Studio, witnesses her radiance and the lavish elegance of her attire (Fig. 8). A photo of the bride and groom together does not seem to have been taken. This was not unusual.

For her ‘going away’, the newspaper tells us, “the bride appeared in a beautiful brown cloth tailor-made travelling dress with green velvet trimmings, a large green hat with heavy gold braid, and a large tulle brown veil completed her equipment”. No wonder the happy pair then went on to have eight children. During World War II, Lady Mercieca ended behind a barbed wire fence in a British concentration camp in east Africa.

A truly charming very early wedding photo portrays an enigmatic couple pushing socially upwards. He may have been a manual labourer who advanced, perhaps a foreman or a successful artisan (Fig. 9). Both look well dressed, she in an à la Turque outfit, complete with headgear which tries to be both hat and turban and ends up being neither. Strangely he does not wear or carry a top hat, but to compensate, has pasted some very sad strands of hair across a ruthlessly bald pate – jissellef in Maltese. He seals his respectability with a gold chain and fob, a gold sovereign I guess.

They both invest heavily in dignity and poise – and plenty of camera stiffness too. He is leaning on a highly decorated turned-wood chair. That sort of prop would usually identify the studio in unsigned photos, though not, so far, in this case.

After the end of World War I, fashion changed drastically, rejecting the romantic but uncomfortable for the more practical, utilitarian and functional. I end this short overview of early wedding photography with an image for which research yielded satisfactory results.

I identified both the studio and the spouses. Dr Guzè Micallef ‘tal-Barkuna’ from Gozo and Miss Maria Melita Cauchi solemnised their marriage on January 29, 1922, in the parish church of St Paul’s Shipwreck in Valletta. Dressed in their wedding fineries, they trudged (quite likely by karrozzin) to one of the leading photographic houses, Chrétien & Co, The Empire Studio, in 291, Strada Reale, Valletta (Fig. 10).

Chrétien’s establishment was at the time enjoying a period of great popularity, their portrait output surpassing even that of Ellis in quantity. Though the Chrétien firm ran the Empire Studio, they openly rejected the empire dogma and anyone who thought it cool or profitable to support it. The firm defiantly signed with its name most of known photos of the Sette Giugno anti-British riots.

The original owner of the business, John Critien, had been the sole agent for the Empire Typewriter Company Ltd based in Canada, and that probably accounts for the name of the establishment. Goffredo Alessandro Chrétien and Giovanni Cilia La Corte had in 1915 purchased his business and became the joint owners of the Empire Studio, active since the 1870s, though who its actual photographer was is not recorded, at least as far as I am aware.

Very inconsiderate of her, Miss Cauchi was noticeably taller than the groom. By now women had ditched the waist-tormenting corset seen in previous wedding photos and the bride wears a moderately daring three-quarters length wedding gown.

Dr Giuseppe Micallef (1891-1940), a good and popular lawyer from Gozo, had just entered politics in one of the two Nationalist parties, the Mizzian, and had been elected to represent the Gozo district; he served as minister twice in the inter-war years. His passion for the Maltese language and for Maltese linguistics prompted him to produce some valuable work in those disciplines. His son, Dr John Micallef, though many years my senior, was at university studying law in my course. He then settled in Canada. The couple also had two daughters, Margaret and Maria.

Around 1925, almost a century after photography began, wedding photos start becoming virtually routine in Malta.

(Concluded)

Acknowledgements:
I have to thank Francesca Balzan, Mgr Prof. Joe Bezzina, Maroma Camilleri, Kevin Casha, Marquis Nicholas de Piro, Rita Flamini, Adrian Mercieca, Dr Gerald Montanaro Gauci, Caroline Tonna and Corinne Vella, for their invaluable assistance.

Correction
Fig 2 in the first part of this feature last Sunday was a photo of the 1910 wedding of Edward Galea from Valletta and Stella Abela, also from Valletta, and not that of Evelyn Segond as was captioned. Galea was an MP in the 1924-1927 legislature after Francesco Buhagiar of the Unione Politica Maltese was made judge and had given up his seat in the first district. Any inconvenience is regretted.